The Pursuit of Values accompanies the 2015 exhibition of the same name curated by Neil Dundas of Goodman Gallery. From the gallery's website:

"In this 2015 retrospective exhibition, Dundas took the opportunity “to examine how Goldblatt’s life’s work has explored and expressed the values of South Africa and its peoples”. The Pursuit of Values included photographs from Goldblatt’s twin projects, South Africa: The Structure of Things Then and Structures of Dominion and Democracy, as well as a number of images that had not previously been exhibited or published.

For almost seven decades, Goldblatt has been paying fastidious attention to South Africans: their individual stories and collective histories, their homes, their journeys, their workplaces. While he never shied away from the grim realities of apartheid – on the contrary, he captured these on film so that they could become more widely known – Goldblatt also sought and found moments of redemption, sympathy and even humour. Over the last twenty years, his camera has been trained on the paradoxes of development and decay, liberty and instability, opportunity and chaos in post-apartheid (or, as some have described it, 'neo-apartheid') South Africa."

The Pursuit of Values is part of a selection of books available from proto~ that coincides with Sean O’Toole’s research exhibition Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook! at A4 Arts Foundation, from February 11 to April 29, 2022.

27 x 27 cm | 224 pages | hardcover

One of South Africa’s most important documentary photographers, David Goldblatt (b.1930; d.2018) spent his career highlighting the fraught political climate of South Africa and its effects on the country’s landscape and people.